A World of Gods and Monsters — Part Six
‘There was a minute silence before memory’s fire’s rekindling and then. Heart alive! Which at very first wind of gay gay and whiskwigs wick’s ears pricked up, the starving gunman, strike him pink, became strangely calm and forthright sware by all his lards porsenal that the thorn tree of sheol might ramify up his Sheofon to the lux apointlex but he would go good to him suntime marx my word fort, for a chip off the old Flint, (in the Nichtian glossery which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious this is nat language at any sinse of the world….. )’
- James Joyce, (1882–1941), ‘Finnegans Wake’
As Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker dreams on he faces accusations for an alleged crime that he had committed in Phoenix Park, Dublin, possibly indecent exposure, but it is never specified, and it varies significantly with every retelling; and the cad with the pipe who haunts the text is back again like a nightmare, here in the guise of an anarchist ‘attackler’ (Peter Kropotkin, (1842–1921), perhaps? … the Russian revolutionary philosopher and advocate of anarcho-communism), engaging the adversary, (H.C.E., and Old Nick, the devil); which is a significant modification to the story of the initial encounter with the cad with the pipe, (thereby outlining the struggle and opposition central to the book’s thematic development), when H.C.E. had denied the accusations made against him upon meeting, in the park, the cad with the pipe; whereupon, and consequent upon the cad’s caddish behaviour, H.C.E.’s denial merely served to shape the rudiments of a rumour that quickly began to spread; different versions of Earwicker’s crime thus circulating rapidly, they eventually inspired Hosty (hostis, (Latin) = stranger, enemy) to compose ‘The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly’ (perce-oreille (French) = ear-wig) that charges Earwicker with public crimes and mockingly identifies him with Humpty Dumpty who had a great fall and was unable to be put back together again; so too is the ballad preceded by a thunderclap precluding the possibility of Earwicker putting back together the pieces of his reputation.
The above quote maybe paraphrased as follows: ‘There was a minute’s silence as the fires of memory rekindled — then, Heart alive! At the intimation of a gay time ahead and whiskey, the starving gunman became calm and swore that he would do some good for him sometime, for a real chip off the old Flint (this is not language in any sense of the word….)’. With his ‘deepseeing insight’ the sleeping H.C.E. retraces the past, memories are evoked, including those concerning his troubles with the caddish character; H.C.E. examining his memory thereby in turn evoking a kind of self against self conflict. And following on from this is the trial of the Festy King (the accused, H.C.E.; festus, (Latin), joyful, merry); which takes place at the Old Bailey in London for whatever alleged crime H.C.E. committed in the park, and in which four judges (like the four writers of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), review confusing and contradictory evidence presented by witnesses. See my article ‘The Metaphysics of Memory — Part Three’, wherein I explain memory to have been shown to be incredibly unreliable, and that no longer is eye-witness and memory considered as premium forms of evidence, for no matter how many people attest to a thing happening, the strength of their convictions, like the hypotheticals that could situate the accused as the offender, comes nowhere near to proving a thing actually occurred; for as slight a thing as the simple manipulation of language serves to sufficiently alter the recount of events significantly, thereby raising the question, just how reliable would a recount of events be if a witness were asked leading questions upon the witness stand?
Which is, in fact, just what happens in the trial of the Festy King. The operations of memory thus characterised as they are in ‘Finnegans Wake’, together with the issues concerning the space/time continuum that I discussed in the previous part of this series, pose a serious problem with regard to that basic conception to be found in Friedrich Nietzsche’s, (1844–1900), ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’, the doctrine of eternal recurrence, (the above quote refers to ‘the Nichtian glossery’, the Nietzschean glossary, which would, of course, include eternal recurrence); this is so whether the doctrine is taken seriously as a metaphysical theory or as a kind of thought experiment that addresses the issue of how comfortably predisposed a subject would have to become and to be toward himself or herself and toward life in general to yearn for nothing more passionately and earnestly than for an infinite repetition, with no alteration, of each and every moment, from the beginning to the end of everything (assuming there is a beginning and an end). The presumption is, reasonably enough, that most of us would, and indeed should, be horrified at the very idea; for though perhaps we could live with the eternal repetition of our lives in an edited version, so to speak, who would yearn with serious intensity for the eternal recurrence of every one of its nightmare moments? Well, of course, the Übermensch would. The Overman, with neither self-deception nor evasion, he alone could accept eternal recurrence; it would be the very mark of the Overman, for the distance of the Overman from ordinary mortals is greater than the distance between man and ape, (see part four of this series where I point out what hardly needs pointing out, that we are apes); though there may be some disagreement among Nietzschean commentators as to whether or not there are any specific character traits by which we may define a subject who does indeed willingly accept eternal recurrence.
At the risk of coming across as someone who does not understand the notion of a thought experiment, or has no appreciation of ‘playful irony’, (as some Nietzschean commentators happily characterise his somewhat eccentric outpourings), I propose to take the doctrine of eternal recurrence at face value and expose its flaws and incoherence; because in the process I will also demonstrate that as a thought experiment it does not yield the results that it is supposed to. For note in the quote above from ‘Finnegans Wake’, that ‘the Nichtian glossery … purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious’ which is ‘nat language at any sinse of the world….’ A priori, relating to or denoting reasoning or knowledge which proceeds from theoretical deduction rather than from observation or experience; a posteriori, relating to or denoting reasoning or knowledge which proceeds from observations or experiences to the deduction of probable causes. Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, (1770–1831), regards time and space as the concern not of logic, but of the philosophy of nature; an account of them markedly different from that of Immanuel Kant, (1724–1804), who regarded time and space not as forms of sensitivity to some kind of external stimuli, and thus as distinct from the concepts of the understanding, but rather as a priori intuitions, whereas for Hegel they are the most fundamental appearances of the concept in nature, and thus they can be conceptually derived, along with their principle characteristics, such as the three dimensions of time and of space; the past, the present, the future; an a priori derivation indeed, but differing from Kant’s in that it is not restricted to time and to space; the place of a body is also derived, along with bodies themselves, and movement; and since Hegel believes time and space to involve each other, while it may be a stretch to suggest he thereby anticipates Albert Einstein’s, (1879–1955), relativity theory, perhaps at least he might be said to have anticipated the science fiction writer H. G. Well’s, (1866–1944), and mathematician Hermann Minkowski’s, (1864–1909), doctrine that time is a fourth dimension. As Wells’ time traveller explains for us:
‘Clearly … any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and — Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh … we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives…. Really this is what is meant by the Fourth Dimension … It is only another way of looking at Time. There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it. But some foolish people have got hold of the wrong side of that idea … Space, as our mathematicians have it, is spoken of as having three dimensions, which one may call Length, Breadth, and Thickness, and is always definable by reference to three planes, each at right angles to the others. But some philosophical people have been asking why three dimensions particularly -why not another direction at right angles to the other three? — and have even tried to construct a Four-Dimensional geometry. … You know how on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a figure of a three-dimensional solid, and similarly they think that by models of three dimensions they could represent one of four — if they could master the perspective of the thing. … Scientific people … know very well that Time is only a kind of Space’.
On the other hand, Hegel’s perspective relies rather more upon commonly recognizable matters such as, for example, that our measuring of time, and our perception of the passing of time, require movement in space; as we may observe with the stars and planets and other celestial bodies. And for Hegel time is ‘the existing concept itself’; the concept is thus connected with the human subject; and although this may appear to anticipate Martin Heidegger’s, (1889–1976), opinion that time is principally the time of decision and of action, and the future is thereby prior to the past and to the present, what Hegel actually means is that in virtue of their conceptual structure, that is to say, the concept, and of the contradictions entangled within it, finite entities develop, change, expire, and bring about other entities; and such changes implicate time, and in the absence of them there is no time; and time is thereby the ‘existent concept’, and is thus intrinsic to finite things and not, pace Kant, a form imposed upon them. And in addition, and this is so important, timeless eternity is prior to time; which is to say, the concept itself and the spirit that ascends to the concept are eternal and not temporal, from which it follows that immortality properly so called cannot be something that belongs to spirit.
And of course Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence disregards this distinction between the eternal and the temporal; or if Nietzsche/Zarathustra believes there to be no distinction that is a position for which arguments are needed. Aristotle, (384 BCE — 322 BCE), certainly discounted the distinction, but then he recognised no transcendent forms; indeed, he questioned the reality of time itself, given that the present presents itself, if I may so put it, in such a manner as to be almost non-existent or negligible, and past and future time are non-existent now, at this present moment; and he rejected the identification of time with motion, but he did associate it closely with motion, in particular regular, circular motion, for time is ‘the number of change with respect to earlier and later’; but as for the eternal and the temporal, between eternity and time: ‘And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal’, (‘Matthew’ 25:46); for Aristotle the eternal, the everlasting, even when applied to God, is everlasting duration, and not timeless eternity.
In Neoplatonic and medieval philosophy, however, the distinction prevailed, and indeed, into modern times. For Kant it proved particularly useful given that his conception of time and space enabled him to resolve such questions, or antinomies as he called them, contradictions, paradoxes, as whether or not the world is finite or infinite in time and space; for if time and space are merely ideal, then Kant can happily assert that they are neither finite nor infinite. However, this idea about reality being timelessly eternal and about time being a form impressed upon it was contested by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, (1775–1854); for time, he insisted, is not some homogeneous medium, but intrinsic to, and expressed or manifested by, the things and events in it: ‘everything has its time … time is not an external, wild, inorganic principle, but an inner principle in the large and the small, always whole and inorganic’. To put it another way, through the principle of measurement the nature or quality of a thing can determine not only its size, but how long it lasts and the duration of its various phases; and therefore, genuine eternity is ‘not the eternity that excludes all time, but the eternity that contains time itself (eternal time) subject to itself. Real eternity is the overcoming of time’; a view of time opposed to that of Isaac Newton, (1642–1726/27), as well as to that of Kant, as was Schelling’s view concerning space.
But it is also not a view on time and space that is easy to comprehend; eternal time overcoming, well, what exactly? Time? What does that mean? A view of time that would certainly suit the Übermensch who is in the business of overcoming things, women for instance; one would expect an Übermensch to overcome a trifling matter like time itself; a possibility afforded to him through eternal recurrence, but only if eternity and time are distinct, that is, if eternity is non-temporal, so that one can overcome the other; but Schelling’s very endeavour to temporalise eternity lands him into a contradictory mode of expression; which in itself suggests that eternity is timeless.
Hegel’s views on space, time and eternity stem much from Greek philosophy of the classical period. Plato, (428/427 or 424/423–348/347 BCE), viewed space as a receptacle in which the becoming of material things occurs, as opposed to the forms or ideas upon which such things are fashioned. Aristotle, for some reason, discoursed on place rather than space; the place occupied by a body is not identical with the body itself, given that a body can change its place; rather, it is the ‘immediate unmoving limit of the containing body’. And Plato spoke of the ‘upward journey of the soul to the intelligible place’. In Platonism this was to become the place of the forms, and has been likened to the mind of God; a spatial analogue of eternity similar to the logical space of Ludwig Wittgenstein, (1889–1951); and if there is one thing perhaps we can agree upon, logical space is certainly timeless.
Parmenides, (born c. 515 B.C.E.), implicates a distinction between time and eternity through his denial of the occurrence of becoming, and thus of the past and of the future, arguing that everything is co-existent in the present. And for Plato time is a ‘moving image of eternity’; eternity characterises the forms, it is timeless, and excludes the use of verbal phrases incorporating past and future tenses; time is identified with the periodic revolution of the heavenly spheres, initiated by the divine demiurge, a heavenly being in control of the material world.
Hegel also deals with the concept of time as it is involved in the physical sciences; and with historical time; world history is the ‘exposition of spirit in time’; and given that spirit ascends to the concept it is thereby timelessly eternal and in no way could eternally recurrence be possible for it; for that to be possible it would have to be temporal with a past, a present, and a future. I would prefer to focus upon Hegel’s understanding of the psychology of time perception, however, in particular with regard to the temporality of music; for this brings me back to the subject of memory. Music and subjectivity are essentially connected; as Hegel explains, music is characterised by its ability to ‘move the innermost self’, which it achieves by assuming control ‘of the ultimate subjective innerness as such’; and this is only possible because music and subjectivity share the essential determination of temporality. Time is the force that binds music and the subject; time is ‘in music the absolutely dominant’; and time is a constitutive element of consciousness. Music is essentially temporal, and so is our subjectivity; time is constituted by our subjectivity, and time is also constituted by music; music and subjectivity thus attain a kind of coinciding at a level of ontology (of being) in virtue of their temporality; and it is this that endows music with its capacity to move the human spirit, as Hegel explains:
‘The ego is in time, and time is the being of the subject itself. Since time and not spatiality as such provide the essential element in which the tone in respect of its musical importance gains its existence and since the temporality of the tone is that of the subject, the tone invades the self even according to this commonality, grasps it in its most fundamental being and puts the I into temporal movement and its rhythm into movement’.
Time is the fundamental embodiment of a natural force through which music apprehends human perception and experience; and since music contains within itself a primordial force and is in itself a temporal art, music delivers a resonance of ‘the way and mean in which the innermost self is moved itself in regard to its subjectivity and ideal soul’. Music identifies, apprehends and discloses the movement of subjectivity in its abstract and ideal form; though it does so fleetingly; while music grasps the motions of subjectivity, the tone falls silent as soon as the ear has grasped it: ‘The tone only resonates in the depth of the soul’. Music has no objective existence; it does not endure; it does not achieve objectivity for itself; it does not attain objectivity for the human subject. Music may well with all of its enchantment seduce a human spirit into a glad receiving with its very temporality, as it draws the listener into the experience it provides, but in the process this very receiving isolates music from the enduring world. The world of music is thereby ‘fleeting, free evaporation’; it never establishes an enduring presence; and though it may reflect and take control of our subjectivity it does not do so in any objective sense.
Music offers the occasion for a reflective and interpretive consciousness to engender a form of enduring meaning within its subjectivity; music is indeed the glass that reflects us back at ourselves; while incapable of freeing us from our subjectivity; which is to say, music is lacking in any metaphysical or religious significance; rather, it is ‘spirit and soul, which sounds immediately for itself’. Music cannot transcend subjectivity; it resonates within the human spirit, it leaves its trace, but it evades capture; in itself and with its tones it objectifies nothing, it does not endure: ‘As soon as the ear has grasped it it falls silent. The impression which is to be achieved here is subjectively internalised: the tones only resonate in the depth of the soul, which is seized in its ideal subjectivity and brought into motion’. Which is to say, the making of music is a process of recall, of recollection, of memory (Erinnerung, see my article ‘The Metaphysics of Memory’ — Part One); the recollection and realisation of inner-experience.
This ‘fluid, free evaporation’ of music is indeed characteristic of memory itself; and so, to apply this to the doctrine of eternal recurrence, that is to say, the infinite repetition, with no alteration, of each and every moment, from the beginning to the end of everything, such vanishing moments that eternally recur would themselves be characterised by ‘fluid, free, evaporation’; by memories of experiences and impressions but dimly and inaccurately recalled; of what should we be glad of the recurrence, of what not?
‘Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never;
Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams!
Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit for ever;
Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems!’
- ‘Bhagavad Gita’, between 400 BCE and 200 CE.
‘ …. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep’.
- William Shakespeare, (1564–1616), ‘The Tempest’, Act 4, Scene 1
Samuel Barber, ‘Fadograph of a Yestern Scene’, Tone Picture after ‘Finnegans Wake’
But Hegel affords no special privilege to the future; philosophy is essentially retrospective, confined to understanding the past and the present; and as we cannot see or prescribe the future, we should thus reconcile ourselves to the present; in this he is in agreement with Epicurus, (341 BCE — 270 BCE), that the future is not our concern. Epicurus said: ‘The flesh receives as unlimited the limits of pleasure; and to provide it requires unlimited time. But the mind, intellectually grasping what the end and limit of the flesh is, and banishing the terrors of the future, procures a complete and perfect life, and we have no longer any need of unlimited time. Nevertheless the mind does not shun pleasure, and even when circumstances make death imminent, the mind does not lack enjoyment of the best life’. Such a doctrine concerning the future was rejected by Søren Kierkegaard, (1813–1855): ‘It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards’.
And yet it certainly coheres with Hegel’s view that free action involves conformity to the norms of ethical life, and not choices of great moment between equally possible alternatives, this latter reflecting the existentialist’s impoverished view of freedom as I explained in part three of this series; although on reflection perhaps I should have said it is no coherent notion of freedom at all; Hegel refers to it as abstract freedom, freedom isolated from all ethical, social, and political context. An analogy I like to use to illustrate concrete, as opposed to abstract, freedom is that of chess; to play it one needs to know the rules, obviously, and one needs to play the game in accordance with them, and though at any moment in the game one is presented with numerous possible moves, the particular moves most likely to get one what one wants, victory in the game, are severely limited; and further, a grand master, who within the context of this analogy stands for the freest person of all, can calculate positions ahead, by perhaps as much as 15 or 20 moves; (I said the analogy is not perfect; some of you may be asking what about chess playing computers? … well, of course, a computer move will always be tactically correct, that is true).
Nietzsche characterises the Overman as virtuous when he frees himself from the belief in God and from the hope of an afterlife; when he is nauseated by the rabble; when his joy comes from surpassing those who live by false hopes and beliefs. And further, as I discussed in part two of this series, the Overman according to Zarathustra has to subjugate women; about which an old crone agrees with Zarathustra when she adds her advice: ‘You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!’ As Bertrand Russell, (1872–1970), said of Nietzsche: ‘… there is a great deal in him that must be dismissed as merely megalomaniac. … It is obvious that in his day-dreams he is a warrior, not a professor; all the men he admires were military. His opinion of women, like every man’s, is an objectification of his own emotion towards them, which is obviously one of fear. ‘Forget not thy whip’ — but nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him, and he knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks’.
Exactly so. I mentioned above that there may be some disagreement among Nietzschean commentators as to whether or not there are any specific character traits by which we may define a subject who does indeed willingly accept eternal recurrence; well, in accordance with my idea of what an Overman would be like, he would not accept it on philosophical grounds. For Nietzsche the Overman is the ideal superior man of the future (I could have focused upon the inconsistency here in that with eternal recurrence (leaving aside its metaphysical and conceptual impossibility in the matter of spirit) the Overman would know that in the eternally recurring cycles he at least at some point enjoys being an Overman) who could rise above conventional Christian morality to create and impose his own values; which for Nietzsche would be Nietzsche’s values; whereas for me an Overman would be wise, knowledgeable, and attuned to philosophical and logical subtleties, enough to be aware of the logical incoherence in the notion eternal recurrence and thus reject it rather than rejoicing in the thought of a notion that is without any cognitive value given that it has neither a coherent nor an unambiguous definition; a bit like the notion God in fact.
‘Oh, blindness to the future! kindly giv’n,
That each may fill the circle mark’d by heaven’.
- Alexander Pope, (1688–1744)
‘To be concluded ….
Notes to ‘Finnegans Wake’ quotation:
1. rekindle = to kindle again, arouse again.
2. gay gay = J.J.
3. whisk = to brush or sweep lightly and rapidly from a surface ; and whiskey.
4. to prick up one’s ears = to become attentive or alert to listen.
5. gunman = a man armed with a gun, killer esp. one hired to kill another.
6. strike me pink! — Used to express surprise or disbelief.
7. fortright = strightfor and that the future is thus prior to the past and the present.ward, immediately, directly forth, without hesitation.
8. Lord’s + Lars Porsena = Etruscan figure associated in conflicting legends with the traditional kings of Rome.
9. porsenal =- porcelain; and arsenal; and Porsena, Lars, king of Clusium, who swore by the nine gods to destroy Rome, but was prevented by Horatius at the bridge. John Joyce was quoted in, and on the book jacket of, ‘Lars Porsena; or The Future of Swearing and Improper Language’, by Robert Graves’.
10. thorntree = any of various thorny trees.
11. Sheol = the underworld; the abode of the dead or departed spirits, conceived by the Hebrews as a subterranean region clothed in thick darkness, return from which is impossible.
12. ramify = to form branches, to branch out, extend in the form of branches.
13. heofon (Old English), heaven.
14. lux (Latin) = light; ‘Lux upon pLux’ (James Joyce, ‘Dubliners’: ‘Grace’); and lex (Latin), law.
15. suntime = time by the sun, a time of brightness or joy; and sometime take my word for it — I can assure you, you may be sure, believe me; and mark, to take notice, to keep watch; to fix (one’s) attention; to consider; and Karl Marx (1818–83), German socialist.
16. chip of the old block = one that resembles his father; and flint, hard stone in general; and Flint, Captain, dead pirate in Stevenson’s ‘Treasure Island’.
17. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, (1844–1900), German philosopher; and nicht (German), not.
18. glossary = a collection of glosses; a list with explanations of abstruse, antiquated, dialectal, or technical terms; a partial dictionary.
19. purvey = to provide, furnish, supply (something).
20. a priori = phrase used to characterize reasoning from causes to effects, from abstract notions to their conditions or consequences.
21. a posteriori = a phrase used to characterize reasoning or arguing from effects to causes, from experience and not from axioms; empirical, inductive; and Jespersen: ‘An International Language’: (quoting Dr. Sweet) ‘the ideal way of constructing an a posteriori language would be to make the root words monosyllabic… and to make the grammar a priori in spirit’.
22. nat = not; and nat (Danish), night (Pronunciation ‘not’).
23. sinse = (Anglo-Irish Pronunciation), sense.
